BEQ 9:45 (Eric) 
[3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
Fireball untimed (Jenni) 
[4.00 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
LAT tk (Gareth) rate it
NYT 9:10 (ZDL) [3.18 avg; 14 ratings] rate it
Universal 7:41 (Eric) [2.80 avg; 5 ratings] rate it
USA Today 12:32 (Emily) 
[1.75 avg; 2 ratings] rate it
WSJ tk (Jim Q) [3.00 avg; 3 ratings] rate it
Dario Salvucci’s Universal Crossword “Swing States” — Eric’s Review
Dario Salvucci’s Universal Crossword “Swing States” — 11/6/25
This appears to be Dario Salvucci’s debut puzzle in a publication covered by Diary of a Crossword Fiend — congratulations!
Since yesterday was Election Day in much of the United States, the “Swing States” title made me think the theme had something do with that concept (which isn’t really relevant except in presidential elections). As I eventually found out, it does.
Paired Across clues are marked with one asterisk, some with two, some with three and some with four. The answers to those starred clues don’t match the clues:
- 17A [*Broncos’ home] DEER Assuming this is about football, the correct answer would be DENVER. There’s a V in the answer above DEER (14A DEVO), but where’s the N?
- 18A [*Unite] CONVALESCE Take the NV (for Nevada) out of CONVALESCE and you have COALESCE, a much better answer for that clue. Swing the NV over to DEER and you’ve got DENVER. (Sorry, DEVO, you’re as irrelevant here as you’ve been since about 1981.)
- 27A [**Erases] DELEGATES
- 30A [**Infantry unit] BRIDE Now we’re swinging the other way — GA (Georgia) swings to the right to give us DELETES and BRIGADE.
- 47A [***Gas grill fuel] PRONE I’m a fan of lump charcoal and couldn’t come up with PROPANE for a long time.
- 50A [***Feeding (on)] PREPAYING PA (Pennsylvania) swings to the left, giving us PROPANE and PREYING. I was still at this point trying to solve by filling in letter patterns and briefly considered that this might be PREPARING.
- 59A [****Monetary gift] DOMINATION
- 62A [****Grinned] SLED MI (Michigan) swings right, giving us DONATION and SMILED.
I like this theme a lot, thought it wasn’t until I was finished that I understood how it worked. That doesn’t bother me as a solver; I always assume that the clue/answer mismatch will become clear eventually. And it’s fun to be puzzled by a puzzle every now and then. Each answer is a valid crossword answer, which I prefer to gobbledygook. Better yet, the four states whose postal codes swing left or right are actually swing states.
Other stuff:
- 5D [Strides with speed] RACEWALK I originally tried RAGEWALK. I like my answer better.
- 16A [What an aspiring judge takes: Abbr.] LSAT Technically that’s not true. In Texas (and, I assume, other states), justices of the peace can preside over small legal cases but are not required to be lawyers.
- 22A [“___ Believer” (Monkees hit)] I’MA We listen to Dwight Yoakam’s SiriusXM channel in the car a lot and have heard more Monkees songs in the last two years than in the preceding 50.
- 44A [Maker of Caramel Churro ice cream] EDY’S Four-letter ice cream? EDY’S even if you’ve never heard of the flavor (which sounds pretty good for something that doesn’t have chocolate).
- 9D [Hindu title that becomes a sentence when its last letter is made first] SWAMI I’d have done better with just “Hindu title.”
- 11D [Birthplace of St. Francis] ASSISI Someday, I will get the esses in the right place first time around.
- 25D [Oldsters] GEEZERS Seems like a missed opportunity to clue this to those who listened to “I’m a Believer” or “Whip It” when they were current.
- 33D [Instrumental learning aids?] TOY PIANOS Cute clue.
Sam Brody’s New York Times crossword — Zachary David Levy’s write-up
Difficulty: Easy (9m10s)
Sam Brody’s New York Times crossword, 11/6/25, 1106
Today’s theme: TONGUE TWISTER (Certain stumbling block … or a hint to three pairs of symmetrically positioned answers in this puzzle)
- CROATIAN anagrams to RAINCOAT
- FLEMISH anagrams to HIMSELF
- LATVIAN anagrams to VALIANT
Why does she bother selling seashells at the seashore, anyway? She’s already at the source. We can leave the middlemen out of this. It’s like selling lava rocks inside the caldera. I can pick up my own damned rocks!
Cracking: B MOVIE, not to be confused with Bee Movie, which ironically was a D+ movie.
Slacking: that is one freeloading appendiceal H hanging off of YOWZAH
Sidetracking: ALOHA Oe
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1833 “Veteran’s Day” — Eric’s Review
Brendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1833 “Veteran’s Day” — 11/6/25
No, today is not Veterans Day — that holiday is still November 11, Tuesday of next week. But there’s nothing wrong with honoring the men and women who’ve served in our military forces a little early. We get VET as a rebus five times:
- 17A [Place for an important newspaper story in a print edition ABO{VE T}HE FOLD crossing 4D [Gentle friendly touch] LO{VE T}AP
- 37A [Four-time Grammy winning country singer Lyle] LO{VET}T crossing 11D [“Really busy right now”] DON’T HA{VE T}IME I was 99% sure that LOVETT was the correct answer; we’ve been fans of his for decades. But since it didn’t fit, I entertained the possibility that there was some other Lyle who I’d not heard of.
- 40A [Rosie was one] RI{VET}ER crossing 26D [Arial alternative] HEL{VET}ICA
- 57A [Desire sinfully] CO{VET} crossing 30D [Artistic soul] CREATI{VE T}YPE
- 65A [When some have lunch] TWEL{VE-T}HIRTY crossing 68D [Fast Chevy] {‘VET}TE This was where the VET rebus finally clicked, when ONE-THIRTY and TWO-THIRTY didn’t fit.
It’s about as solid as you get with a rebus puzzle. There are enough clues that have one obvious answer that it’s not too hard to see the rebus. The fact that all five rebuses are the same three letters makes it easier. Given the ease of the trick, I’m not sure why my solving time was on the slower side.
Other stuff of note:
- 10A [Draft Kings info] ODDS I don’t bet on sports (or anything, really). It’s only through BEQ’s puzzles that I’ve heard of the DraftKings gambling website.
- 20A [Prime minister Takaichi] SANAE The recently installed Japanese prime minister’s full name was an answer in Brendan’s themeless puzzle this past Monday. I bumbled the answer then, but was glad it was a gimme today.
- 52A [Thai hot sauce] SRIRACHA I perpetually want that second A to be an I. Some time in the last year or so, I read that there was a shortage of that sriracha, but I don’t know if that’s still going on.
- 59A [Bracelet part] CLASP Not CHARM.
- 63A [Actress Alyvia ___ Lind] ALYN I didn’t recognize that name, but I’ve never seen her in anything.
- 12D [Two-time WNBA MVP Elena Delle] DONNE Another name that I know only from crosswords.
- 27D [Place to schuss] SLOPE The ski resort closest to home hopes to open its season on November 22. I’m skeptical; it’s been too warm here for snowmaking to be practical.
Dan Schwartz & Will Eisenberg’s USA Today Crossword, “Final Fantasy” — Emily’s write-up
You might want to take cover!
USA Today, November 06, 2025, “Final Fantasy” by Dan Schwartz & Will Eisenberg
Theme: the last word (aka “final”) of each themer is the name of a fantasy creaturea
Themers:
- 22a. [Largest extant lizard in the world], KOMODODRAGON
- 39a. [Weekly newspaper published Tahlequah, Oklahoma], CHEROKEEPHOENIX
- 50a. [“Where I Come From” artist], PATTYGRIFFIN
A wide variety of themers in today’s set with KOMODODRAGON, CHEROKEEPHOENIX, and PATTYGRIFFIN. Only the first filled for me easily, while the other two took a few crossings to get. With the theme, we get a DRAGON, PHOENIX, and GRIFFIN.
Favorite fill: NOLA, SASSY, TIPJAR, and PALEODIET
Stumpers: SEAT (misdirected by cluing–thought of role instead of object), LAIR (needed crossings, though fitting for today’s theme!), and GREATTAPE (also needed crossings)
Overall a fun puzzle! Some of the cluing was tricky for me so it was a longer solve for me. Loved the theme!
4.0 stars
~Emily
ZDL: It may be sacrilegious, but once you see the “ass” in Assisi, you’ll never have problems with it again.
????
He meant Eric
Sorry for the brain fart.
Thanks for the mnemonic.
Thanks for the tip. I also have entered ASSISI tentatively. Until now
haha, i always have had this problem too, but now i’ll never forget. more like Ass WAS I
Well, St Francis supposedly spoke to the animals, or something.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
A neat trick that helped me solve the puzzle once I figured out what was going on.
Point of order on 1A: I think Spaceballs is firmly in the spoof category. Among Mel Brooks movies, The Producers and Blazing Saddles are both much closer to FARCE.
SPOOF instead of FARCE cost me a minute or more.
I’d stick most of Brooks’ oeuvre, including Blazing Saddles, in the spoof/parody category. If The Producers is a takeoff, I don’t know what the original might have been.
Same, although I suppose you could argue that since it does such a poor job of following any of the elements of Star Wars that it’s barely a spoof.
In my dictionary, “spoof” has a picture of Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
The grid feels a bit cramped for a Thursday.
NYT: I didn’t pick up on the anagram aspect of the theme until after I had completed the grid. While I was solving, I thought the revealer was referring to the pronunciation of the word in the first of each pair of theme clues. After the fact, it seems pretty clever.
Liked the clues for IOUS and CAUCUS.
I figured it out after seeing the revealer; at first I was worried that the words were somehow mixed between the two to make new words, but the anagram was much nicer. Really nice Thursday!
Puzzle: Universal; Rating: 4 stars
My first impression on completion was that it was a very complicated theme without much to justify all the letter scrambling and moving, but Eric’s review helps me better appreciate the cleverness behind it. I’m upping my rating! Thanks Eric.
13:29
You’re welcome.
I’ve struggled with the themes in some of the Universal puzzles in the last month (to the point where I have needed David Steinberg to explain a few). I initially thought this was another theme that had gone over my head, but I gave it a little more time and the concept clicked.
Thanks for letting me know you found the review helpful.
I started doing the Universal kind of grudgingly as a time killer while I wait for my wife to wake up. But over the months I’ve done enough puzzles to find the quality pretty high. But the software is so basic compared to the NYT, you don’t get any help noticing patterns or fun graphical elements to make themes clearer. (I never do paper puzzles, but I suppose it must be similar…)
NYT: I thought the theme was very clever, but YOWZAH really irked me. It’s apparently a legitimate variant but YOWZA, I really didn’t like it.
You and Marciem kindly expressed interest in the weird job I had where sleeping in the office was sometimes encouraged.
I wrote more about it in last Thursday’s comments.
https://crosswordfiend.com/2025/10/29/thursday-october-30-2025/#comments
Thanks again for asking.
Hi Eric,
I missed your explanation, so thank you for pointing it out! I have to say there had been times in my life when I was living by myself and thought during a late night at work, “It’s 10pm, and I have to be back here at 8am. Maybe I should just stay here than drive 40 minutes each way.” I guess it’s probably a good thing that I had had no place to sleep, or I would have been like you and your colleagues!
Just so I understand – it’s not that people were giving you stuff at 3am for the first time, right? My impression is that it was more like the scenario I outlined above, where you might as well stay once it gets late enough, but I’m not sure that impression is correct.
No, it wasn’t entirely unheard of for us to get new assignments during the wee hours. If a bill was in conference committee, the committee might not meet until the evening, and we’d get drafting instructions very late. So we’d hang around waiting and waiting for instructions that sometimes never came if the members couldn’t agree on something.
Boy, you all were very dedicated! It’s wonderful you and the others were willing to stay overnight to help out the state. I hope it was appreciated by the other people you worked with!
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 3.5 stars
I worked in the Bill Drafting Office for the Nebraska Unicameral and also worked overnight on occasion, including special sessions with short bill-introduction deadlines. The job suited me in ways you described in your 10-29 comment. I liked that after the short (second) session of the two-year Legislature, all bills died so we closed the chapter on them.
It’s an unusual job, but it suited me well.
I did eventually get a bit burned out, but that might have had more to do with some serious health issues during my last several years working.
Eric,
I just now saw your note here and went to read your explanation. Pretty impressive I might say! Also pretty tiring I can imagine, engendering the need for sleep equipment during that hectic time.
Thanks for taking the time to explain it all :)
You’re welcome. Thanks for asking about it.
NYT: There’s a certain type of crossword puzzle where the theme is “look at this clever and interesting niche word thing I found—there’s no real place for it but I want to share it as widely as I can!” And so it gets shoehorned into a crossword, but it doesn’t feel right.
In fact, combined with a certain entry in the puzzle, it brings to mind something I stumbled on years ago. 17a [Prancing horse and golden bull, in the auto industry] LOGOS. (Those are Ferrari and Lamborghini, respectively.) It just so happens that FERRARI is an anagram of FARRIER, which is the name for someone who shoes horses. Even if I could find several more examples like this, I wouldn’t deem it appropriate for a crossword theme.
The theme fell flat with me because I’m really not interested in how to say the theme words in the theme languages.
I’d call it a green paint theme. Maybe there’s a better term, but that’s what I thought while solving last night and reviewing it this AM
I didn’t catch on to the anagram part of the theme until I was finished. If I’d seen that earlier, it certainly would have helped. As it was, I worked out the languages and the translations separately, based on crosses and pattern recognition.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 4.5 stars
Gary R, thanks for pointing out here and above, as did ZDL in his review, that the theme of the crossword was twisting tongues, that is, language names, rather than words that were hard to say. Embarrassingly, I missed that, as I’m poor at anagrams. To me, knowing this elevated the puzzle a lot in my estimation, though I enjoyed it anyway.
Puzzle: NYT; Rating: 2 stars
did not like the theme either. Figured out it was an anagram of language, but the word in the language was no help.
I mostly agree. I don’t even know how one would set about searching for words in obscure languages that are anagrams of that language’s name in English. So I appreciate the effort that went into making this puzzle, but I wasn’t that excited about solving it.
It isn’t so recondite. Just looking for names of languages that can be anagrammed to English words. The rest is dressing.
Easy enough to understand. I’m not so sure about how easy it is to execute. Playing around for a few minutes with an anagram generator, I was able to come up with GERMAN/MANGER, but not much else.
I’ll add NORSE/SNORE or SENOR
Per the constructor notes on Wordplay, Sam Brody also considered FARSI/FAIRS, SCOTS/COSTS, NEPALI/ALPINE, ENGLISH/SHINGLE and ESPERANTO/TEARS OPEN (plus the ones you and PJ mentioned).
LATVIAN/VALIANT
@Martin – I think Sam got that one. ;-)
Eric – ENGLISH/SHINGLE is a legit anagram, but given that the puzzle is in English, I don’t know how you clue that as part of the theme.
Wow. A two brain-fart day. In my weak defense, I did the puzzle a month ago.
Puzzle: WSJ; Rating: 4.5 stars
Mike Shenk is a wizard at creating difficult crosswords, and in this one he adds the word “ole” to six answers before the revealer at the end, which is “skipole”, but needs to be read as “skip ole”.
Have the answers been posted somewhere?
I went to the WSJ website and at the bottom of the puzzle there’s a “Reveal” button.